Printing PDF Documents to Read in Hard Copy

Often when printing out PDF books, I find that there are often graphics in the margin which would go through ink cartridges very quickly.

If you are using Mac OS X, you can just use the select tool – command-3 – and then choose to crop. Crop is command-K.

Nasty black/red border gone. If the PDF is encrypted you won’t be able to save it, but you will be able to print it once on your printer. Buckets of ink saved.

This little hint is important to me as I almost never read long works on the computer screen anymore. I print them out to be read offline and where I can easily make notes on the pages.

There are probably similar techniques which would work with Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader.

The next thing I do is set up my printer to print fast (which uses less ink and is much faster) and to put two vertical pages side by side on a single A4 or 8 1/2 x 11 page. This saves time, ink, paper and storage space. Most ebooks and reports use large enough type that one ends up with material which looks more like a book and is easier to read.